Sarvam AI In Talks To Raise $250 Mn At $1.5 Bn Valuation: Report

Bengaluru-based AI startup Sarvam is reportedly in talks to raise up to $250 Mn in a fresh funding round led by Nvidia, Accel and HCLTech.

As per a Moneycontrol report, the round could value the startup at about $1.5 Bn, marking more than a sevenfold jump in its valuation in under two years. 

If the deal materialises finalised, Sarvam could become one of the youngest startups to enter the unicorn club. The AI startup was founded by Vivek Raghavan and. Pratyush Kumar in August 2023. 

Inc42 has reached out to Sarvam for confirmation of the development, the story will be updated based on the responses.

Prior to Sarvam, Bhavish Aggarwal-led Krutrim AI became the first homegrown AI startup to enter the unicorn club with a $50 Mn funding round in January 2024. 

The AI startup last raised $41 Mn in December 2023 in a Series A round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Peak XV Partners and Khosla Ventures.

The fundraise comes amid Sarvam’s bid to position itself at the centre of India’s push to build sovereign AI capabilities. 

At the recent India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the startup unveiled two large language models, Sarvam-30B and Sarvam-105B. Both models are trained from scratch in India and are optimised for Indian languages and enterprise use cases.

Sarvam-30B is positioned as a lightweight, cost-efficient model with a context length of up to 32,000 tokens, trained on nearly 16 Tn tokens. The larger Sarvam-105B supports a 1.28 Lakh token context window, enabling more complex reasoning and agent-like workflows. 

The startup claims that the models perform competitively with global peers of similar size, especially in reasoning, coding, and Indic language tasks. The startup open-sourced its models as part of its broader strategy to build a domestic AI ecosystem. 

However, early developer feedback has also suggested adoption hurdles, including limited tooling support, lack of easy deployment formats, and missing integrations with widely used inference frameworks.

Beyond the LLMs, Sarvam offers various platforms like Saras, Bulbul (for speech and voice AI), while also offering enterprise platforms like Samvaad, Arya, Pravah, Document Intelligence etc. It has also launched a consumer app named Indus AI Chatbot.

The startup also recently expanded into hardware and ambient AI, recently unveiling “Kaze”, a pair of AI-powered smart glasses designed to process audio and visual inputs in real time.

Sarvam operates in a small but growing cohort of Indian startups building foundational AI models, alongside players like Gnani.ai and the BharatGen consortium. These efforts reflect a broader shift towards a distributed, ecosystem-led approach rather than relying on a single national AI champion.

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